Serious Flooding in Gowanus Today

All the rain today brought flooding into Gowanus and parts of the Slope. Weather.com posted photos of severe flooding at Fourth Avenue and Carroll Street (pictured above) and 9th Street between 2nd and Smith. South Slope News nabbed photos of crazy flooding on 4th Avenue between President and Garfield and minor flooding along 7th Avenue. What’s the situation over in Gowanus now, since the rain’s calmed down a bit?Twitter photo via Weather.com

and I thought it was because that the city cannot dump storm runoff water directly into the river anymore and has to process it though treatment now that doesn’t have the capacity when it rains this heavy. Better to have that water in your basment than the river I guess.

that’s not true – the sewers still overflow into the rivers when they are over capacity to try and prevent water in the basements, but in some places, like Park Slope, they can’t even get the water from the neighborhood to the canal for a number of reasons, including increasing impervious surfaces as people pave over backyards (along with 100 year old infrastructure). 4th Ave is problematic because its flat and wide so water coming down the slope both in and out of the pipe hit it and slows down.

There is also the fact that while the DOB and planning departments approve rezoning to increase capacity, no one is requiring increases to necessary infrastructure to deal with that additional capacity. When you tear down three story buildings and replace them with 15 story buildings, one has to wonder what happens when everyone flushes at the same time?

New buidling are required by code to drain 50% of their storm runoff from the roofs into retention tanks on thier properties buried in the ground. The old buidling they replaced went 100% into the NYC sewer. What difference does height make here. After 40 plus years here, the sewers only started backing up into basements when the city replaced all of the corner sewer catch basins. The storm sewers are backing up into basements alot higher up the slope than just 3rd or 4th ave and that is a very recent development. I realize that ultimately eliminating the combined sewers with a seperate sanitary and storm sewer is ideal. But do we really have to suffer with sewer backups during heavy rains until that is complete?

The 12 story buildings come with many more sewage producers in them. And new buildings only have to hold 50% of rain from a 1″ rain fall. This weeks rain was a 3″ rainfall. With climate change intense rainfall is becoming more of the norm. Would be wonderful to have separate sewers so that flood waters would only be rain waters.

Some neighbors in Carroll Gardens told me that they had some minor (about an inch or so) basement flooding at the peak of the yesterday morning’s storm. The water receded by noon but they were perplexed because their basements usually don’t flood (east of the gowanus, by Clinton St). Some thought it was the intensity of the storm but after reading some of the comments I am starting to wonder if the changes in the gowanus infrastructure aren’t affecting other areas further away. Did anyone else have flooded basements yesterday that normally remain dry during heavy rain storms?